Roy Lichtenstein
The Pop artist of comic panels.
Roy Lichtenstein enlarged comic-strip panels with Ben-Day dots and speech bubbles. Whaam! is his best-known work.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York. He studied art at Ohio State University and served in the army in Europe during the Second World War. After the war he taught art at various universities and for a long time painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, without much success.
The turning point came around 1961. According to an often-repeated story, one of his sons challenged him by saying he couldn’t paint as well as a Mickey Mouse comic. Look Mickey of 1961, showing Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse with a fishing rod, is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1962 he exhibited with the gallerist Leo Castelli in New York and became one of the leading figures of Pop Art.
Lichtenstein enlarged comic panels and advertising images into large paintings. He imitated the tiny halftone dots of commercial printing, Ben-Day dots, and used thick black outlines, flat primary colours and speech bubbles. Whaam! of 1963, showing a fighter plane exploding, is in Tate Modern in London. Drowning Girl of 1963, with a weeping woman in the waves, is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The pictures look mechanical but are carefully recomposed.
Critics were sceptical at first, and in 1964 Life magazine asked whether he was the worst artist in the United States. He has also been criticised more recently for using comic artists’ images without crediting them. In the 1960s and 1970s he made series of brushstrokes, mirrors, Art Deco motifs and studio interiors, and paraphrased Picasso, Monet and other masters in his own style. He also made sculpture.
Lichtenstein died in 1997. Together with Andy Warhol he is regarded as one of the most important Pop artists, and his dotted comic panels have become some of the most recognisable images in 20th-century art.